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Beyond action: applying consequentialism to decision making and motivation
Get PDFIt is often said that there are three great traditions of normative ethics: consequentialism,
deontology, and virtue ethics. Each is based around a compelling intuition about the nature
of ethics: that what is ultimately important is that we produce the best possible outcome, that
ethics is a system of rules which govern our behaviour, and that ethics is about living a life
that instantiates the virtues, such as honesty, compassion and loyalty. This essay is about how
best to interpret consequentialism. I show that if we take consequentialism beyond the
assessment of acts, using a consequentialist criterion to assess decision making, motivation,
and character, then the resulting theory can also capture many of the intuitions about
systems of moral rules and excellences of character that lead people to deontology and virtue
ethics.
I begin by considering the argument that consequentialism is self-defeating because its
adoption would produce bad outcomes. I take up the response offered by the classical
utilitarians: when properly construed, consequentialism does not require us to make our
decisions by a form of naïve calculation, or to be motivated purely by universal benevolence.
Instead it requires us to use the decision procedure that will produce the best outcome and to
have the motives that lead to the best outcome. I take this idea as my starting point, and
spend the thesis developing it and considering its implications.
I demonstrate that neither act-consequentialism nor rule-consequentialism has the resources
to adequately assess decision making and motivation. I therefore turn to the idea of global
consequentialism, which assesses everything in terms of its consequences. I then spend the
greater part of the essay exploring how best to set up such a theory and how best to apply it
to decision making and motivation. I overcome some important objections to the approach,
and conclude by showing how the resulting approach to consequentialism helps to bridge the
divide between the three traditions
What to do when there isn't enough: the fair distribution of scarce goods
Get PDFMy DPhil submission consists of a series of papers on related topics on the moral philosophy of scarce benefit distribution. It focuses on two types of scarce benefit distribution case. The first type occurs when which all potential beneficiaries of a good each have an equally strong moral claim on an equal benefit from the resource but scarcity or indivisibility prevents us from benefiting all potential beneficiaries. Call these cases equal conflict cases. In 'Anti-Majoritarianism', I argue against the view defended by both utilitarians and non-utilitarians that in equal conflict cases you always ought to give the benefit to as many people as possible. I argue that doing so is neither morally right nor fair. In 'Weighing Up Weighted Lotteries', I argue that the philosophical debate between unweighted and weighted lottery benefit distribution procedures has been misconceived and that fairness requires us to use a new kind of weighted lottery that I call the exclusive composition-sensitive lottery. In 'Can't Get No Satisfaction', I defend a new view that I call the dual-structure view about how lotteries satisfy potential beneficiaries' claims in equal conflict cases and highlight the implications of that view for the distribution of donor corneas to those who have suffered corneal degeneration. The second type of this distributional problem occurs when we can either benefit a very large number of potential beneficiaries with a very small benefit (call these the many) or a very small number of potential beneficiaries with a very major benefit (call these the few). In "Valuing the Few Over the Many" I argue that there are cases where not only ought we to benefit the few over the many no matter how numerous the many are, but it is also better to do so. However, this conclusion can be shown to conflict with a number of widely held tenets of value theory. I evaluate different ways of accommodating these intuitions and argue that in some contexts, benefits are not of finite value. The view I defend in 'Valuing the Few Over the Many', combined with some intuitively plausible axiological claims, is inconsistent with the transitivity of the 'better than' relation. In 'Making Betterness Behave' I argue that for what I call the conditional non-coextensive thesis: if 'better than' is not transitive, one ought to take the position that 'more reason to bring about rather than' is transitive. I argue that one can generate a transitive 'more reason to bring about rather than' deontic ordering from a non-transitive axiological ordering in a principled way. This deontic ordering avoids the major practical objections (money pumps, moral dilemmas and threats to practical reasoning) to non-transitivity of the 'better than' relation
Prudence, Morality, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma‹
No full text"From the Proceedings of the British Academy, London, volume LXV (1979)" - title page. Series: Henrietta Hertz Trust annual philosophical lecture -- 1978 Other Titles: Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol.65: 1979
Equality or Priority
Get PDFThis is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1991, given by Derek Parfit (1942-2013), a British philosopher
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